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Close Your Eyes and It's Almost Like Radio

IRA GLASS is having vision problems. This longtime public-radio producer, arguably the most visionary aural documentarian in the country, is not going blind; he is trying to bring "This American Life," his quirky and popular weekly radio hour, to the small screen. And he's worried that the bright lights of television might suck some of the power out of the show's intimate, confessional and often revelatory narratives.

A director, an editor, a producer and Mr. Glass were camped in an editing studio near Canal Street in Lower Manhattan at 2 a.m. earlier this month, making the last push to finish the 40-minute pilot of "This American Life" for Showtime. "This is everything that is really slow about production, times 500," Mr. Glass moaned, summing up the four-month process.

Mr. Glass, 46, has broken a lot of the rules of radio with "This American Life." Each week its three segments, contributed by a cast of regulars and a variety of guest writers, thinkers and soulful eccentrics, are loosely organized around a theme like "Fiasco," "Reuniting" or "Mind Games." But the themes are almost incidental; it is the show's literary quality and Mr. Glass's offbeat production values that give them their intense power and appeal. Mr. Glass uses strategically placed breaks and music, along with droll asides and occasional audible giggles, to spin tales filled with irony, suspense, paradox, drama and humor out of the stuff of everyday life. The show has explored with equal vigor the worst production of "Peter Pan" ever staged and the despair of the second intifada. And it has given major career boosts to writers like David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell and David Rakoff.

"This American Life" now has 1.7 million listeners on more than 500 stations, representing one of the biggest audiences on public radio and turning Mr. Glass into a kind of matinee idol for a certain bookish-but-hip sliver of the population. It has won a Peabody Award and a duPont-Columbia Award for broadcast journalism. David Mamet credited Mr. Glass with "reinventing" radio. But Bill McKibben, writing in The Nation in 1997, unwittingly pointed up Mr. Glass's current predicament when he bestowed this compliment: "None of the pieces I've heard on 'This American Life' would work well on TV."

Indeed, few shows since the era of Jack Benny and Burns and Allen have survived the transition. A number of public radio shows have tried and failed many times. "Television is the opposite of radio," said John Hockenberry, who spent 12 years as a reporter and host at N.P.R., followed by nine years in television at NBC. "TV speaks to a crowd, and radio speaks to a single pair of ears."

Nonetheless, the offers from television began arriving after the show's first year in 1995. For a long time, Mr. Glass demurred. But Showtime was persistent.

"We knew that if he could translate it visually, it could be something special," said Robert Greenblatt, the entertainment president of Showtime Networks. And Mr. Glass and his staff of six producers (three in Chicago with him, and three in a Brooklyn Heights office) were eager to attract new audiences -- and money.

"Public radio is a cocoon," Mr. Glass said one day in the editing studio. He was wearing a collared shirt, dress pants, black shoes and his trademark black horn-rimmed glasses, a look that conveys none of the hip confidence that his voice alone projects. "Not too many people listen who don't know about it already. This would be a great way of drawing listeners to the radio show."

It's obvious why so many people reveal their innermost thoughts and desires on "This American Life." In person, Mr. Glass is palpably empathetic, and to be around him for only a few minutes is somehow to feel as if you want to tell him your best story. But surrounded by his staff, he appears to be just another member of the team, consulting his colleagues often and praising them liberally to outsiders.

Mr. Glass spent more than a year on the pilot, and went through two directors before coming upon Chris Wilcha, a smart, funny and easygoing filmmaker whose documentary, "The Target Shoots First," was a hit on the festival circuit. Mr. Glass wanted the television pilot to have a look as distinctive as the radio show's sound. He and Mr. Wilcha agreed that the two segments featured in the pilot should be shot in a spare, cinematic style, using static shots. And inspired by the movie "Magnolia," Mr. Glass also wanted an opening montage featuring three brief vignettes. Brand New School, a multimedia graphics company that has produced numerous television commercials, agreed to produce the segment, using digital photography and special effects.

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Both the stories featured in the pilot were also produced for the radio show. One is about a couple who cloned their prized bull; the other is about a good-natured prank that goes awry. In comparing the two formats, Mr. Glass discovered the effect of seeing people otherwise left to a listener's imagination. One man's face time in the television segment had to be cut down because he came off as much more insincere on screen than on the radio. The narrative, which had been so finely balanced on radio, was suddenly thrown off kilter.

"On the radio, you become the character," Mr. Glass explained. "But when you see someone on TV, you come to all sorts of conclusions about who they are, based on their hair and what they are wearing."

Mr. Wilcha and Jenny Golden, the editor, explained that the tradeoff goes both ways, that images can also deliver power and emotion in ways that words and sound cannot. "What took a lot of time," Mr. Wilcha said of the radio staff, "was that they didn't want to be told that things didn't work. They wanted to be shown." In particular, Mr. Glass wanted to stop in the middle of one of the stories and have two of the principals hold a conversation on camera. Such moments, which occur frequently on the radio show, are among the most meaningful to him, he explained. But Mr. Wilcha and Ms. Golden talked him out of it. "We had built something that didn't accommodate stopping in the middle," Mr. Wilcha said. "It would have felt like it had dropped off a cliff."

Mr. Glass still feels the loss. "So the thing that I think of as being at the heart of the whole thing is not there," he said.

A few days later, after a DVD of the pilot had been sent around, Mr. Glass was more positive. He said he thought it had achieved a distinctive look, and captured the radio show's conversational voice. Indeed, the opening sequence has a fresh, dreamlike quality. But the humor that is a staple of the radio show is in short supply.

Mr. Glass still liked the radio versions better. "Part of what is a mystery to me and the rest of the staff, honestly, is that it is so much less of a writer's medium," he said in a phone conversation one evening from Chicago. "Or we haven't figured out how to be writers in the medium the way we are in radio."

Jay Kernis, a longtime radio and television producer who is now senior vice president for programming at N.P.R., saw the pilot and said he thought Mr. Glass had succeeded. "It is the essence of the radio show on television," Mr. Kernis said. "He has managed to translate the remarkable storytelling technique, the intimacy and his personality." Mr. Kernis even said he thought Mr. Glass looked good on camera.

And he was not just being nice. In an earlier interview before he saw the pilot, Mr. Kernis declared: "Television always harms radio. The question is, how much harm can you bear?"

Showtime has until December to decide whether to pick up the series, which would mean commissioning 10 to 13 episodes. But Mr. Glass also has the option to walk away, and he is not sure what he will decide. "I feel like I am really going to have to think about it," he said.